Four thousand billions. That's qualifies as more than a few digital objects.

"Windows Azure Storage has had an amazing year of growth," Calder wrote. "We have over 4 trillion objects stored, process an average of 270,000 requests per second, and reach peaks of 880,000 requests per second.

"About a year ago, we hit the 1 trillion object mark. Then for the past 12 months, we saw an impressive 4x increase in number of objects stored, and a 2.7x increase in average requests per second."

Why is this happening? Same reasons all data is multiplying and taking more capacity at a frenetic pace:

1) We have more devices that create files.2) Businesses and consumers are basically keeping everything.3) We're deleting--and deduplicating--very little.4) Files are getting larger, especially when it comes to high-definition video and audio. 5) Machines (video surveillance systems, for example) are cranking out more data6) Personal storage is inexpensive.7) Automated backup and cloud storage is easy to set up.

We could go on, but these are the main ones we're seeing here at "The Station."

Calder adds color here: "Windows Azure Storage uses a unique approach of storing different object types (Blobs, Disk Drives, Tables, Queues) in the same store, as described in our SOSP (Symposium on Operating Systems Principles) paper. The total number of blobs (disk drives are stored as blobs), table entities, and queue messages stored account for the 4+ trillion objects in our unified store.

"By blending different types of objects across the same storage stack, we have a single stack for replicating data to keep it durable, a single stack for automatic load balancing and dealing with failures to keep data available, and we store all of the different types of objects on the same hardware, blending their workloads, to keep prices low."